Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Fragment – Jupyter For Edu

With more and more core components, as well as user contibutions, being added to the Jupyter framework, I’m starting to lose track of what’s possible. One of the things I might be useful for the OU, and Institute of Coding, context is to explore various architectural patterns that can be constructed in a Jupyter mediated environment that are particular useful for education.

In advance of getting a Github repo / wiki together to start that, here are a few fragments my my feeds, several of which have appeared in just the last couple of days:

Jupyter Enterprise Gateway Now a Top Level Jupyter Project

The Jupyter Enterprise Gateway “enables Jupyter Notebook to launch remote kernels in a distributed cluster“, which provides a handy separation between a notebook server (or Jupyterhub multi-user notebook server) and the kernel that a notebook runs against. For example, Jupyter Enterprise Gateway can be used to create kernels in a scaleable way using Kubernetes, or (I’m guessing…?) to do things like launch remote kernels running on a GPU cluster. From the docs it looks like Jupyter Enterprise Gateway should work in a Jupyterhub context, although I can’t offhand find a simple howto / recipe for how to do that. (Presumably, Jupyterhub creates and launches user specific notebook server containers, and these then create and connect to arbitrary kernel running back-ends via the Jupyter Enterprise Gateway? Here’s a related issue I found.)

Running Notebook Cells One at a Time in a Terminal

The ever productive Doug Blank has a recipe for stepping through notebook cells in a terminal [code: nbplayer]. The player launches an IPython terminal that displays the first cell in the notebook and lets you step through them (executing or skipping the cell) one at a time. You can also run your own commands in between stepping through the notebook cells.

I can imagine using this to create a fixed set of steps for an activity that I want a student to work through, whilst giving them “free time” to explore the state of current execution environment, for example, or try out particular “given” functions with different parameters. This approach also provides a workaround for using notebook authored exercises in the terminal environment, which I know some colleagues favour over the notebook environment.

On my to do list is recast some of the activities from the new TM112 course to see how they feel using this execution model, and then compare that to the original activity and the activity run using the same notebook in a notebook environment.

The repo also shows a way of bundling nbviewer to allow users to “publish” HTML versions of their notebooks.

Doug also points to yuvipanda/jupyterhub-firstuseauthenticator, a first use authenticator for Jupyterhub that allows new users to create an account and then set a password on it. This could be really handy for workshops, where you want to allow uses to self-serve an environment that persists over a couple of workshop sessions, for example. (One thing we still need to do in the OU is get a Jupyterhub server up and running with persistent user storage; for TM112, we ran a temporary notebook server, which meant students couldn’t save and return to notebooks on the server – they’d have to download notebooks and then re-upload them into a new session if they wanted to return to working on a notebook they had modified. That said, the activity was designed as a “displosable” activity…)

Zip All Notebooks

This handy extension — nbzip — provides a button to zip and download a Jupyter notebook server folder. If you’re working on a temporary notebook server, this provides and easy way of grabbing all the notebooks in one go. What might be even nicer would be to select a sub-folder, or selected set of files, using checkbox selectors? I’m not sure if there’s a complementary tool that will let you upload a zipped archive and unpack it in one go?